I own two Glove80s, but for me the ultimate split keyboard with a thumb cluster was the Dygma Defy, of which I now own a pair as well. Couldn't recommend it enough. https://dygma.com/pages/defy
> Another reason is that on the supply side, nobody wants to sign up to do a bunch of free work just to be rejected. If you just put up work, the candidates incur all the risk, meaning they walk away with nothing if you don’t hire them.
It's true, but prepping for a typical senior+ onsite loop in big tech still requires weeks of grinding leetcode, re-learning the latest system interview questions and the system interview answer framework, refreshing and rehearsing STAR stories, studying the company and its unique quirks that you're expected to know to pass the culture filter, remembering how to do all of this speedrun-style since you only get 40ish minutes per session, etc.
While that knowledge is more reusable across onsites, it's likely even more work than doing real or pretend-work for the company for a couple of days.
> When candidates get to walk away with something of lasting value that they can keep forever
I'm curious why them getting rejected from the position, even with the work sample they can carry away with them, wouldn't be still interpreted as a negative from future employers. "The other co passed on them, am I the fool for thinking they're good?" type of herd mentality which is often unavoidable.
Won't that "work sample guest book" be treated as the list of all companies that rejected you, a net negative for your personal brand you're projecting?
> (Me paraphrasing what Steve was implying) Take-homes are impacted by AI one-shotting them for candidates
I've been pleasantly surprised by how much you can glean from having the candidate upload their conversation log with the coding agent for whatever take-home you give them.
I was going to scoff at the amount of interview prep you said is required but then I remembered I read the book written by the founders of my current company before the interview.
Author here. A collection of personal experiences of working with business co-founders and CEOs as an early stage CTO in the Bay Area VC-backed world. Hope it's useful to others in the role who want to maximize their chance of success in this critical partnership.
This is great stuff, walking the reader through your thought process was helpful for me as a developer to grok why yolobox was designed this way. I ended up landing in the "just make a local copy, don't get fancy" world myself after many iterations of workflows. Separate agents, separate containers, separate ports, that all resonates.
You mention this approach gobbling up a bunch of extra disk space as a consequence of the tradeoffs. Have you considered using APFS cloning on macOS to reduce some of that burden, or is that too tiny of an optimization to be worth it at this point?
I'd try a modern file system with de-duplication/copy-on-write support. `cp` creates reflinks automatically if the file-system supports copy-on-write.
> Support for reflinks is indicated using the remap_file_range operation, which is currently (6.18) supported by bcachefs, Btrfs, CIFS, NFS 4.2, OCFS2, overlayfs, and XFS. Some external file systems support them too, including bcachefs and OpenZFS.
The paragraph was supposed to be descriptive of what one sees in the field, not prescriptive of what managers should do. I can see that it doesn't obviously read that way. Will edit, thank you for the feedback.
Hey Tikhon! The Haskell thing was such a great way to filter for interesting frontier people back in the day, as we both experienced. That was a contrarian bet at the time, but it paid off handsomely for at least a few of us. The number of people we'd get to interview was only a fraction of the broader population, but it felt like 30-50% of the people we would talk to were awesome fits.
I've often heard the idea that you can always teach someone how to code, but you can't teach them to want to be great at it.
At the same time, I think there's a limit to how great someone can get even with a lot of experience. We see that with sports, there's probably a similar limit to cognitive activities too.
You can probably get the average, already smart person, to be a pretty good 8/10 on just about anything, be that music, math, writing, coding. But there are levels beyond that may require natural wiring that most of us just aren't born with. An extreme example of course, but there's no amount of experience I can acquire to get to a von Neumann level of genius, but fortunately we don't need that to build business web apps.
The designers were extra mindful of different thumb lengths, making it so that you can usually find a configuration that feels natural and not cramp up your joints: https://dygma.com/blogs/product-development/how-we-developed...
reply